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French Writer Wins Nobel Prize

LONDON — The French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, whose work reflects a seemingly insatiable restlessness and sense of wonder about other places and other cultures, won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. In its citation, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Le Clézio, 68, as the “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”

Mr. Le Clézio’s work defies easy characterization, but in more than 40 essays, novels and children’s books, he has written of exile and self-discovery, of cultural dislocation and globalization, of the clash between modern civilization and traditional cultures. Having lived and taught in many parts of the world, he writes as fluently about North African immigrants in France, native Indians in Mexico and islanders in the Indian Ocean as he does about his own past.

Mr. Le Clézio is not well known in the United States, where few of his books are available in translation, but he is considered a major figure in European literature and has long been mentioned as a possible laureate. The awards ceremony is planned for Dec. 10 in Stockholm, and, as the winner, Mr. Le Clézio will receive 10 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.4 million.

At an impromptu news conference in Paris at the headquarters of his publisher, Éditions Gallimard, Mr. Le Clézio seemed unperturbed by all the attention. He said he had received the telephone call telling him about the prize while he was reading “Dictatorship of Sorrow,” by the 1940s Swedish writer Stig Dagerman.

“I am very happy, and I am also very moved because I wasn’t expecting this at all,” he said. “Many other names were mentioned, names of people for whom I have a lot of esteem. I was in good company. Luck or destiny, or maybe other reasons, other motives, had it so that I got it. But it could have been someone else.”

In a news conference in Stockholm after the announcement, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize each year, described Mr. Le Clézio as a cosmopolitan author, “a traveler, a citizen of the world, a nomad.”

“He is not a particularly French writer if you look at him from a strictly cultural point of view,” Mr. Engdahl said. “He has gone through many different phases of his development as a writer and has come to include other civilizations, other modes of living than the Western, in his writing.”

Last month, Mr. Engdahl provoked a wave of indignation when he criticized American writers as “too isolated, too insular” and “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” Europe, he declared, is “the center of the literary world.” No American has won the Nobel literature prize since Toni Morrison did in 1993.

Mr. Le Clézio was born in 1940 in Nice and raised in a nearby village, speaking English and French. His father, a British doctor with strong family connections on the island of Mauritius, lived in Africa for many years while Jean-Marie was growing up. When he was 7, Jean-Marie traveled to Nigeria with his family and spent a year out of school, an experience he recalled later in his semiautobiographical novel “Onitsha” (1991).

He studied English at the University of Bristol, graduated from the Institut d’Études Littéraires in Nice, received a master’s degree at the University of Aix-en-Provence and wrote his doctoral thesis for the University of Perpignan on the early history of Mexico. He has taught at colleges in Mexico City, Bangkok, Albuquerque and Boston; has lived among the Embera Indians in Panama; and has published translations of Mayan sacred texts.

Photo

The works of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio reflect a sense of wonder about other cultures.Credit
Michel Euler/Associated Press

His first marriage ended in divorce; he married again in 1975. He and his second wife, Jemia, who is from Morocco, divide their time among Nice, Mauritius and Albuquerque.

Mr. Le Clézio became a literary sensation with his first novel, “Le Procès-verbal” (1963), published in English as “The Interrogation.” The novel follows the meanderings around town of a sensitive young man who winds up for a time in a mental hospital. It has been compared in mood to Camus’s “The Stranger.”

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“The latter part has a very contemporary feel,” said Antoine Compagnon, a professor of French and comparative literature at Columbia University. “It has an openness to others, to other cultures, to the South, to minorities. This is a very current sensibility.”

Bronwen Martin, a research fellow in the French department at Birkbeck College in London, said Mr. Le Clézio’s work had recently become more popular among academics. “I think it’s because of his more explicitly postcolonial work,” said Ms. Martin, who has written two books on Mr. Le Clézio’s writing.

In 1980, Mr. Le Clézio published “Désert,” the story of a young nomad woman from the Sahara and her clashes with modern European civilization. The book was considered his definitive breakthrough, and it became the first winner of the Grand Prix Paul Morand, awarded by the Académie Française.

In the United States, David R. Godine, one of a handful of publishers that have released Mr. Le Clézio’s works in English, plans to issue a paperback edition of “The Prospector” (translated from “Le Chercheur d’Or” in French) and plans to publish “Désert” in English.

In a reminder that politics and culture are closely intertwined in France, the prime minister, François Fillon, said in a statement that the award “consecrates French literature” and “refutes with éclat the theory of a so-called decline of French culture.”

Mr. Le Clézio is not one to seek the limelight. He once described himself in an interview as “a poor Rousseauist who hasn’t really figured it out.”

He said, “I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that.”

Asked at the news conference if he had any message to convey, Mr. Le Clézio said: “My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he’s not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He’s someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.”

Reporting was contributed by Alan Cowell, Chine Labbé and Basil Katz from Paris, and Motoko Rich from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Restless Literary Explorer From France Wins a Nobel. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe